Al Franken says John Belushi's death convinced him to kick drug habit

Laughter may be the best medicine, but funnyman Al Franken needed something a bit more tragic to steer him off drugs.

The "Saturday Night Live" veteran (and current U.S. senator from Minnesota) reveals in his new memoir that it wasn't until co-star John Belushi died that he realized the dangers of drugs and finally kicked his habit.

Advertisement

Franken, 66, spent 15 years on the NBC sketch show, first as a writer, and then as a performer, and writes in his book "Al Franken, Giant of the Senate by Al Franken" that he at first only managed to get through the relentless schedule with a little help from some notorious white powder.

"It began to leak out that some of the ("SNL") cast and writers on the show thought that you can't do a ninety-minute live comedy show week after week without doing cocaine," he says, according to an excerpt from People.

And while Franken was no stranger to drugs — he'd smoked pot in college and later dabbled in LSD — it was Belushi's 1982 sudden death at 33 years old from a speedball overdose that convinced him it was time to give up drugs for good.

"Before Belushi died, we didn't realize it could kill you," Franken told People. "I did (stop). I think Belushi dying was an, 'Okay.' I started going to Al Anon. That was really when I stopped using. I would go to meetings around Rockefeller Center."

Franken, who breaks up his time on the show with chapters titled "Not the Drug Part," "The Drug Part" and "The Part Where I Leave," left "Saturday Night Live" in 1995, and was elected to the Senate in 2008.